[ music | Herbie Hancock – Rockit ]

Awesome. That is all.

[ music | Michael Buble – I’ve Got You Under My Skin ]

I upgraded to Firefox 2, but Prefbar 3.3.1 isn’t compatible yet. Anyone know anything about it?

Update: Dude! The originator of the Prefbar extension commented, and alerted me to some issues with the whole situation. I hope the community can help find a way out of this and bring back an incredibly handy tool.

[ music | Queen – We Are The Champions ]

The secret is out. Firefox beat the pants off IE’s download numbers. From Beltzner’s blog:

Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.

Schwing.

[ music | Sheryl Crow – My Favorite Mistake ]

I had a call a few weeks ago. So far my absolute favorite call. A customer calls, and I’m walking them through various things, and I have to tell them to type in a specific string of letters and numbers. One of the characters was a zero, so as not to confuse it with the letter O I said “zero”. The customer then replied, “Is that the number zero or the letter zero?” I kid you not.

[ music | KT Tunstall – False Alarm ]

So, I’m reading Lucy’s (Majken) blog post on her introduction to the Credits panel in Firefox. She’s SUCH an attention whore. But her calling me at 3 in the morning mewing like a cat is entirely off the topic. Oh, wait, no, that’s someone else. Anyway. So what do I see? I see this:

Yep. It’s too late for me to make some crucial contribution to get my name in the credits. Damn. Guess I’ll have to wait for Firefox 2.0.0.0.0.0.1.

Anyway, so Lucy (still Majken) has made it into the credits. She’s the other Connor above Mike, but below Mary Colvig. Look closely, you’ll see her name…

[ music | Peter Gabriel – Shock the Monkey ]

Whoa. Pardon me while I have a cup of awesome. This press release from Qualcomm is incredible. I used to use Eudora years ago, and loved it, but switched over to MozMail for the integration in the Suite. When Firefox and Thunderbird hit the shelf, I moved over, and they work great together. But this bit about Eudora now being based on TB is awesome, because we’ll get Gecko goodness with Eudora’s feature set. I just hope they keep or improve on TB’s spam filtering. This is something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

[ music | Depeche Mode – A Pain That I’m Used To ]

So, a couple times in June and once in August I get this near-pain in my upper abdomen. A little research showed that it was in the area of my gall bladder. It wasn’t horrendous pain. I just had to sleep carefully on one side, and it only happened after a couple really cheesy meals, so I assumed it was some kind of indigestion of the fatty cheeses.

Flash forward to last night. About 11:30pm I get the same pain, although it dulls a little. I get a couple hours sleep. The pain returns about 8 in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep. Still not really bad yet, I waste a couple hours then get ready for work. It’s getting pretty bad now. 1pm rolls around and I feel like I’m being stabbed over and over. This is a little more than I can deal with, so I decide to go to the hospital. Over the next ten minutes it got much much worse, and getting to the hospital on my own is no longer an option. I’m doubled over in agony, pale as death (from what I hear), sweating like a klansman in Harlem, and call 911. By the time the ambulance comes I’m weak, shaking, dizzy, and nauseous as hell. They put me on oxygen and hit the gas to the hospital. I do the technicolor yawn twice during the ten minute ride. We arrive and they start an IV, take blood, give me a wonderful cocktail of painkillers in my IV, and I’m back on Earth.

A few hours and tests later we find out I need my gall bladder removed. I have three gallstones, and they can’t do the ultrasonic crushing like kidney stones. So, I’ll consult with some surgeons, watch my diet, and get it yanked in the next few weeks.

I’d like to take this moment to thank the Republican party for helping make it possible for 44 million Americans to have no health insurance by demonizing every national healthcare initiative as “socialism”, and not raising the minimum wage in over a decade, yet raising their own pay 7 times in the same period. Rock on!

[ music | NIN – We’re In This Together ]

The miniseries was incredible. The first season was so fracking huge it didn’t end until six episodes into the second season. The last 5 minutes of the Season Two finale took my head and twisted completely around.

The season premier of Season Three completely blew me away. Best TV show ever. This is why God invented TV.

[ music | The Ramones – I Wanna Be Sedated ]

Back from the dead. Register.com was actually very helpful. Kudos to them. Still in hibernation though, for now… We’ll see…

[ music | Depeche Mode – I Want It All ]

It’s very simple. Debian currently values their name and logo, and you can’t use it willy nilly without their permission. Same goes for Mozilla and their Firefox trademark. Now, so far Debian has been using the Firefox trademark with permission from Mozilla. It was a lax permission, and the rules of that permission have changed. The rules did not change to be mean, or to be arbitrary, but due to the fact that the law states trademark holders must defend their trademarks or lose them. Adobe asks you not to call photo editing “Photoshopping”; Google asks you not to say “Googled” when you went to a search engine; Xerox barely managed to hold on to their name due to aggressive marketing, which is why you probably get documents photocopied instead of xeroxed. Mozilla must do the same, and the problem that Debian is running into is they want to heavily edit the codebase to the Mozilla foundation’s flagship browser, essentially creating their own product, and yet still call it “Firefox”. You can’t have it both ways.

There is a branding “switch” built into the Firefox codebase. Turn it on, and the the official logos and names are used. Turn it off, and you can build your own branded browser automatically with almost no extra effort. Debian broke this switch (knowingly, this wasn’t an accident, it was broken because they “needed” to make various other edits) and wound up hardcoding the Mozilla trademarks into the Debian browser. Rather than doing what other vendors do, rebranding it, Debian is pitching a fit because Mozilla is saying, “Look, we need to fix this situation. Stop using the trademarks, or start following these updated rules.” Had Debian not broken the branding switch, this would be incredibly easy for Debian to fix, just flip the switch and call the browser Iceweasel or Doodyhead or BigDaddy or whatever they want to call it. But they broke the switch, and painted themselves into a corner, and want to blame Mozilla.

Stop whining. We had to change the name from Phoenix because of Phoenix BIOS’s products. We changed the name from Firebird because of the Firebird project. We changed the Mac based browser Camino from the former name of Chimera. Those were all legit requests. When Firebird was picked, it was a logical choice, but poorly researched. The fiasco after that and the response by both the Firebird project and Mozilla were incredibly poor, but it was resolved in the only logical fashion. As of now, Debian is being asked the same thing. Please follow the rules we have for our name or change the name of your product. The code itself is as free as it always was. The issue is not about code, it’s about protected names, identities that users attach to one product and organization.

Otherwise, I’m going to launch a line of manure-based fertilizer called Debian, with the slogan, “We’re so full of shit, it’s like getting ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag!” and of course, I’ll slap the official Debian logo on the bag. After all, valuable and trusted legally-protected identities want to be free!